A European plan for nature protection

Today, the European Commission published the “EU Action Plan for nature, people and the economy,” following the results from the fitness check of the EU Birds and Habitats Directives last December.

Photo: Javier Díaz Barrera (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The EU Action Plan includes 15 actions that aim to improve the Nature Directives implementation in order to reach the EU’s biodiversity targets for 2020. Among these actions, the plan proposes to partially reallocate the use of EU environmental funds – LIFE – towards nature conservation. Unfortunately, this will not result in additional funding for the environment, as the overall budget of the LIFE fund will remain unchanged.

IUCN welcomes this plan which should now kick-off without further delay,” says Luc Bas, Director, IUCN European Regional Office. “IUCN will work with its Governmental and NGO Members to support the implementation of this action plan.”

The 15 actions fall under four priority areas that should be carried out between now and 2019. Although actions on pollinators were discussed during the process of elaboration of this Action Plan, those have ultimately not been included.